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You wake from the dead with electricity in your teeth and the slosh of guilt renewed in your chest. It's a familiar enough feeling to ground you, so much so that you bat away Liam's hands when they first reach for you upon waking. Your senses scream that any tenderness in the form of bandages and lingering traces of fingers along your jawline or, G-d forbid, the whispered we could've lost you, would rend you at the seams before you're ready to stitch yourself back together.
So you lock yourself in the jack-and-jill bathroom between your room and his. Small distinction it makes, now, with the distant memory of how his warm breath fanned over your cheekbone this morning, thirteen hours prior, as he watched you because he can tell when you're dying inside and but he can never quite tell when you're just faking being asleep. You haven't slept in separate beds since—well. We don't talk about it. No one talks about it.
You lock yourself with the first aid kit, the rotten good that it'll do you, and you root around with trembling thumbs and aching wrists for the gauze and butterfly bandages and needle and thread and shears. The point is decent. Its prick is a fair mimicry of a bee sting. Hardly the pain you craved to ground you further, but enough of a buzz to remind you of the monster you never ceased being even when the boy with the golden eyes wrung the necks of the two hunters who'd carved the word MUTT into your sternum.
But you should have known better than to think a single privacy lock would hold back the hurricane that is Liam's love when he has no idea how to wield it. He can't always smell when you're lying, but he can smell when your words say you want to be alone but the rest of you silently sobs for the company of his warmth pressed against your bicep.
He muscles his way in. He stops and stares. You take a deliberate pause in your attempts at haberdashery on your own skin. A pause, not without a discernible flinch, because you can't help the scuttling thought that monsters are born as accidents. They don't stand around in a pool of sea glass green towels and stitch themselves back together in self-remedy of their own monstrosity. Frankenstein's brows would meet his hairline at that one.
Your tongue itches to say his name. You wait it out.
He caves first. "Theo."
What a stupid talent to possess, the ability to say your name and communicate a hundred other inarticulable words with it.
"I'm almost done," you murmur, end of the thread between your teeth, like the embarrassed child caught by his mother opening the door in the middle of him scrubbing the crayon wax from the carpet fibers. Hide the imperfections, rein in the throat-beating heart of terror as the master surveys the spots you missed in your carefully crafted veneer.
"You're in pain," Liam says inelegantly. A non sequitur. Even more so a jarring follow-up: he flows forward and reaches out his hand toward your face.
Another flinch. The glint of dampened silver in his eyes tells you he didn't miss it.
His questing fingers slow and find purchase on the junction between your neck and jawline. His hand slips up at an angle, thumb gliding over the sweat-slick mess of your face, to find the hill of your cheekbone beneath the beaten and battered flesh.
And then, all at once, like a tide that was always meant to find the siren call of the moon the way you never quite could, the pain ripples out of you and leaves you rocking and sting-eyed on your heels.
He smells the salt from your eyes before you have the chance to realize it. His thumb slips higher up and digs into the pouch of skin below your eyeball, darkened by night fears and eleven hours of electrifying interrogation. You probably smell like scorched flesh. He smells like the rains in Ohio that summer when you were fourteen and so lost, because the Doctors had killed your best friend in the cages and you'd realized for the first time that all the years you'd betrayed your own trust in yourself had been for nothing.
He thumbs away the tear before it can even drop from your lashes.
"You could have left me there," you hiccup. Not an expression of wonder or gratitude, nor even of shame, but a rebuke. You should have left me there.
"Never in a million different universes," Liam whispers.
His hand is beginning to feel like a brand. You want to squirm under the touch but don't. Maybe you've found your personal kanima. Maybe he has you paralyzed.
"Why do you care?" And though you whisper it back, you wish you could scream it.
"You'd do the same for me. You'd come for me. If it was me being held in that cell and tortured to death."
"That's different." You wish he'd move his hand from your cheek, because your knees threaten to collapse. "You say that as if I'd have any choice. I'd always come for you, Liam. I care about you—don't know why and I don't know how. But I can't help it. I started caring about you by accident."
Starting caring about him in the middle of I-80 in a truck speeding toward a bleak and gaping freedom, when Scott McCall upended your plans again with a phone call.
Liam tries a shaky smile that doesn't quite touch his eyes. "Well." He shrugs. "That's just too bad, because I'm about to disappoint you, Raeken. I care about you on purpose."
Liam Dunbar truly is the hammer sent to pulverize your bones. It only takes those words for your knees to buckle and his hands to shift to catch you.
Corded arms around your waist, scent of sweat-dried hair and blooming relief pressed against your throat. You sag bodily into his chest and drink in the rhythm of his heart singing I found you I found you I found you I found you over and over again.
He's crushing you, just a little bit, but you're just now beginning to realize that maybe this kind of pain is the kind that sweetens with time. And as you lean and let go into his embrace, blood and needle and guilt forgotten, you realize, too, that the pain of his affection is the better sort to sip in between your teeth for grounding.